Enjoy Life

Category: Uncategorized

There are some things you grow up eating that will forever remain a part of your life no matter where you go or what you are doing. This traditional Polish vegetable salad, also known as Jarzynowa Sałatka, might not be revolutionary, but it is a staple in many Polish homes growing up. It’s filling, relatively nutritious, tastes yummy and is easy to take with you to work!

Prepare your vegetables to be cooked. It’s best when they are chopped into small pieces, like cubes.Tip: If you use canned vegetables, this saves you time!

Put your vegetables in a pot and cook until soft.

After your vegetables have boiled, drain the water out.

Leave your vegetables out on the counter to cool to room temperature.Tip: If you are in a hurry, you can run your vegetables under cold water. Mix them occasionally. Once they are cold, make sure all of the water is drained out. You can use a colander while running them under water to help make this faster!Eggs:

Place the eggs in a pot, fill with water and cook on high until the water boils.

Once the water is boiling, turn off the heat and keep the eggs in the pot. Cover the pot with a lid and place on a cool burner.

Let the eggs stand in the hot water for 12 minutes.Tip: This website has some tips on making perfect hard-boiled eggs.

Take the pot to the sink and run cold water into it. You want to make the eggs cool to the touch so you can handle them.

Once the eggs are cold, you should peel them and rinse to make sure there are no pieces of shell left on them.

Prepare and Mix in the Remaining Ingredients:

Place the cold vegetables in a large bowl.

Grate the eggs over the vegetables.

Mix the ingredients together.

Grate the apples over the vegetables and eggs.Tip: You can leave the skin on, but if you don’t want the skin it’s OK to peel it off first.

Mix the ingredients together.

Add the mayonnaise.

Add the spicy brown mustard.Tip: If you aren’t comfortable using spicy mustard, it’s OK to use one that isn’t spicy.

Add as much salt, pepper and paprika as you’d like.Tip: If you’re not sure how much to add, start with a little, mix the salad up and try it. It’s always better to add gradually and taste. Remember, you can’t take salt out after you add it!

Mix all of the ingredients up (by hand) until you see that everything is nicely combined.Tip: Don’t over-mix or your vegetables will start to get mushy. You aren’t making baby food! Unless you are making baby food. If that’s the case…you’ll probably make some tweeks to this recipe and let me know how it goes!

Pour your salad into a new bowl. Garnish with parsley flakes (dry or fresh) and paprika.

Store in the fridge for an hour before serving to make sure all of the flavors have time to combine forces.

Enjoy your salad and Enjoy Life!

What’s the twist?

Traditional Polish Vegetable Salad often includes pickles and/or onions. This recipe is for those who do not like pickles or onions! It also adds paprika to the recipe.

*Full disclosure: Dzioenna is an affiliate of Amazon and will receive compensation from Amazon for any purchases made through links on this site.

Asking the right questions during your interview is just as important as your own responses to the questions you get asked. It also helps you get to know the people you’ll be working with, build rapport and make sure the organization is the right fit for you.

Below are some questions you, as a Scrum Master or Agile Project Manager, can ask the interviewer of the company looking to hire.

Understanding how the Scrum Master fits into the Organization

How involved is this Scrum Master role in deployment activities?

How many teams share the same code? Do you already have any processes in place to make working on shared code a smooth experience or would you like help from the Scrum Master to improve that process?

What roles are part of the dev teams? Does the Scrum Master here coordinate with UIUX, Technical Writers, DevOps, Marketing, Legal or others?

Responsibilities that a Scrum Master or Project Manager Sometimes Help With

What reporting does the Product Owner handle and what does the Scrum Master own?

Will the Scrum Master have access to the application? Is the Scrum Master expected to help test?

Is the Scrum Master also a Project Manager? Do you have Project Managers? How involved in monitoring the budget and resources are your Scrum Masters?

Will the Scrum Master need to work with any vendors?

Test the Waters and Get to Know the Organization

What do you think will be this Scrum Master’s biggest challenge?

What support from a Scrum Master is most important to you?

Are you looking for a Servant Leader? How important is that to this part of the organization?

Who currently joins demos? Does anyone outside of the technical team join demos?

Does each dev team currently have a Scrum Master and Product Owner?

Some Questions You’ll Wish You Asked Before You Accepted Their Offer

How long is this dev team expected to work together? Will the team be growing this year?

Is the organization growing? Are you expecting any new dev teams to emerge this year?

How do you get user feedback?

How big are your dev teams? How many developers and testers are on your dev teams?

How many teams does each Scrum Master manage in your organization?

Knowing About Their Processes Will Be Helpful

How flexible is this part of the organization with process changes?

If the team wants to switch from Scrum to Kanban, does someone need to approve it?

If the team is using JIRA and wants to change swimlanes or the workflow, is that OK?

Is process currently owned by each dev team or by leadership?

Does this team support sustaining work or is it all new development?

Does the Product Owner approve every ticket before it gets closed?

Who provides sign-off before a release and approves deployments? Are the Product Owner and Quality Assurance involved?

What kind of support, on deployments, does the team provide? Is the team expected to work nights and weekends?

Are They Even Agile?

Do you use traditional project plans?

Do you use release maps?

What tools do you use to track work? JIRA, Asana, Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Trello, HP Application Lifecycle Management, Microsoft Project, or others?

How long are your sprints?

How often do you have major releases? How often do you push out hotfixes?

Does the dev team currently hold refinement sessions?

Is the backlog shared by multiple teams?

Do all the team leads and Scrum Masters have Scrum of Scrum meetings regularly?

Working Remote

How often do the Scrum Masters in the organization get together in person?

How often does the development team get together in person?

How often will this Scrum Master or Project Manager need to come into the office?

How many Scrum Masters or Project Managers currently work remote?

Obviously you should not ask ALL of these questions or too many. Use your intuition to judge how many and what kind of questions you should ask. Make sure you listen to the person interviewing you, and that you don’t ask the same questions they just asked you!

And make the interview more of a conversation in some respect. Meaning, ask your questions throughout the interview as organically as you can. You don’t need to necessarily wait until the end of the interview to ask questions.

Let us know what other questions you asked during your interview.

Good Luck! And more importantly– Enjoy Life!

Are you looking for an Agile Coach or another Scrum Master to bounce ideas off of? Joanna Kasperek has years of experince running projects in Agile and coaching organizations through their transition from Waterfall to Agile. Reach out to Joanna at joanna.kasperek@hotmail.com to schedule a phone session today!

What happens next? You can lose a toe, a leg or another part of your body.

Having low circulation is extremely painful physically and emotionally.

Recall that painful sensation when your leg fell asleep and it’s just starting to regain feeling– that horrible pain many associate with a million needles prickling your skin. Multiple that by ten. Now imagine that pain never going away. Each step feeling like you are stepping on shattered glass with a bare foot. Or a thousand small knives stabbing you.

Once you start to develop gangrene it’s even more painful. The pain never stops. No position makes you feel better. No over-the-counter pain killer will make sleeping easier. Some doctors say that once your vascular disease reaches a certain point, even the strongest prescription medication won’t lessen the miserable pain.

With gangrene, parts of your body decompose. It smells like it too. Showers don’t help. Changing the dressing covering your dying flesh is painful, but only helps with the smell for a few minutes, hours if you’re lucky. Smoking constricts blood vessels to the point of strangulation. Your body can’t breath, and if left untreated, a day will quickly arrive when you won’t breath either.

What’s next is an amputation. That’s if you’re lucky enough to have your cardiologist approve the anesthesia required for the surgery. If you have clogged arteries due to smoking, chances are you have heart issues as well. Chances are you won’t get approval for the surgery and you will need to resort to “making the patient as comfortable as possible” as you wait for your dead flesh to fall off on its own.

Now that I am finally married to my partner of nearly four years, I can honestly answer the question…

DO LONG DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS MAKE SENSE?

Relationships are always hard. They require compromise, understanding, patience, dedication and real, honest love. When you add separation due to physical distance to the mix, it only gets harder.

Just a few decades ago, long distance couples had to send letters or postcards to each other as their primary means of communication. Imagine waiting a month, or more, to hear from the person you love. I can’t imagine the patience that would require. I hated dealing with the seven hour time distance when it came to calling my significant other on the phone or Skype.

If I had do it again though– I would.

The Huffington Post published a post a couple years ago about the benefits of being in a long distance relationship. In it, the author Grace Buchele says that being in a long distance relationship actually strengthened her relationship. People laughed at her, and people laughed at me too when I said that.

Being separated by distance makes you rely on non-physical means of communication. You know when your boyfriend doesn’t text you back for an hour because he’s at the gym or running an errand? Well imagine how you’d feel if he was in another country. Imagine not being able to see him for months.

Every word you exchange by text or in conversation matters so much more in a long distance relationship. If you write something rude out of frustration or a bad day, it’s a lot harder to apologize or make it up to your significant other when he/she lives far away from you.

In a long distance relationship, you learn how to better communicate. There is no place for immature games in this type of relationship. You have to say what you want, need, think and feel in the most straightforward and thoughtful way possible. Your partner can’t read your body language over the phone or emails. If you are ever uncomfortable about something– you need to speak up! Throw your pride out the window and be honest.

The one great thing about a long distance relationship is that you both learn how to communicate with each other. Some couples are together for decades and have issues communicating. That needs to get resolved once you get separated by distance…or your relationship won’t last.

Watch the video below for some tips on effective communication.

Another great thing is that you actually get to know each other. So many relationships these days are purely physical. Or even worse– when in person, one person is constantly on his/her phone and not paying attention. Conversations on the phone or Skype tend to lead to getting to know more about your partner’s past, family, goals and hobbies.

So many people I know are frustrated with the dating scene in the States. I hear complaints about dating being too casual, people not knowing how to communicate or people simply not taking dating seriously.

Long distance relationships make sense when both partners take each other seriously, are willing to communicate and stay faithful to each other. Finding true love is hard. Dating in person or over a long distance is also hard. So when you find someone you love, fight for it.

There’s something about birds that terrifies me. It started when I was a kid. We read an excerpt from Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds” in school and that same week I caught a few of the worst minutes of Alfred Hitchcock’s film when I went to see what my dad was watching on tv.

“As he jumped the stile he heard the whir of wings. A black-backed gull dived down at him from the sky, missed, swerved in flight, and rose to dive again. In a moment it was joined by others, six, seven, a dozen, black-backed and herring mixed. Nat dropped his hoe. The hoe was useless. Covering his head with his arms, he ran toward the cottage. They kept coming at him from the air, silent save for the beating wings. The terrible, fluttering wings. He could feel the blood on his hands, his wrists, his neck. Each stab of a swooping beak tore his flesh. If only he could keep them from his eyes. Nothing else mattered. He must keep them from his eyes. They had not learned yet how to cling to a shoulder, how to rip clothing, how to dive in mass upon the head, upon the body. But with each dive, with each attack, they became bolder. And they had no thought for themselves. When they dived low and missed, they crashed, bruised and broken, on the ground. As Nat ran he stumbled, kicking their spent bodies in front of him.”-Daphne du Maurier

Growing up, we had a variety of pets at home– dogs, cats, fish, lizard, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits, and even birds. We must have had at least a dozen parakeets throughout my childhood. I was friends with of our first two parakeets, named Romeo and Juliet. It’s when my younger sister got her favorite parakeet named Cleo that my life officially changed forever. My sister knew I had a small discomfort with birds that I was working on. Unfortunately that did not stop her from letting Cleo out of the cage whenever I was in the room. It was as if Cleo could sense my fear too, because she’d always fly toward me! I had to hide under tables and literally run away from her through the entire house at times.

I really do feel like birds can feel my fear. I’ve had to cross the street to avoid flocks of pigeons in the city. I’ll occasionally try to cough loudly in an attempt to discreetly scare birds on the street away from me without people realizing I’m too scared to share the sidewalk with a bird.

I’m not the only one. Lucille Ball, one of my favorite actresses ever, had a fear of birds. Rumor has it that she refused to stay anywhere with birds incorporated into the decor. According to Teen.com, One Direction’s Niall Horan has ornithophobia because a pigeon attacked him while using the bathroom. Scarlett Johansson is afraid of birds too. According to Page Six, Johansson says it runs in her family.

Former Bachelorette Kaitlyn Bristowe had to deal with birds on her season, and I felt her pain as I watched!

Still, with my fear of birds, I love them! I love any clothing or decorations with birds. I find them to be beautiful. My sister created a graphic art dedication to pigeons a few years ago (click here to check it out) and while I pretended to not like it at the time, I secretly loved it!

While out buying some fabric for an upcoming project, I found myself adding prints with birds to my cart. My mom asked me what I planned to do with it. I don’t know yet, but I’m excited to see what the finished product will look like!

I don’t understand my irrational love for bird fashion, but I will continue to enjoy them as long as they don’t come to life one day like Chuckie.